Twitter Clutter

When Twitter first came out my reaction was ‘I get it. I also don’t get it.’ You got 140 characters to say something. People are going to follow you are not. Simple as that. They want to hear what you got to say. These people can be the most random individuals you will never ever meet (granted they are real to begin with). But it was the newest social media tool to be on at the time. So, yeah I created an account or two and began tweeting away.

Then celebrities got on board.

Then companies, businesses, brands, marketers, etc.

Before you know it you’re following 2K people and you have a twitter stream that is so overwhelming to make any sense of. The sight of the stream somehow just breaks the brain and you begin to no longer bother viewing it. Besides, tweets have changed from ‘I am using the bathroom right now.’ to ‘Read about these great deals…etc. etc.etc.’ I guess that’s progress though.

As a regular user the value of Twitter seems small. You do not use Twitter in the same way as Facebook. You can but why not just use Facebook then? You also have more characters to work with if you choose.

As a marketer Twitter is a tool to easily get your marketing message to a lot of users fairly easily. However, I am really curious how effective Twitter for this these days. Of course it depends on your target audience. But for the most part if you are targeting everyday users most people I know do not have Twitter. Or they do and they just have dropped off using it. So, you can send a marketing tweet but who is really reading it these days?

The real people that make full use are Twitter seems to be celebrities and high profile personalities. Because of their status and how easy it is for them to tweet people pay attention. Mostly TMZ I am assuming. I kid. We all want to know what Trump is going to tweet about next.

Let me talk about my usage.

I have a professional twitter account that I use for work. The tweets are rarely directly from me manually typing a message but more so from a system that sends out promotional, marketing posts related to my industry. I have gained some followers as a result. Those followers seem to be people in the same industry or related-industry. I wonder sometimes if they just do the same thing. Are we all just blindly automating tweets and letting the systems do their thing? I say that because I rarely ever truly log into my professional Twitter account to check on things. Reason? The clutter I see when login. The people I am following are tweeting the same types of tweets I am.

At the end of the day for me I haven’t benefited from Twitter. I tried paying attention to my stream and just stopped. I once tweeted an airline how bad their service was and got their attention but that was about it. For the sake of habit I have it just to have it. There is value to a lot of other people otherwise it would not be as big as it is now.

This is just a rant post of course. It’s not like Twitter is going away. When I get done with this post I’ll most likely tweet this post with my RadRobotAttack twitter account. Why? It’s sorta habit I suppose.